Tuesday, May 14, 1996
Union must gain bargaining powers to right wrongsBy Mercedes
Ibarra
Tonight at six in Kinsey 51 members of SAGE/UAW will vote
whether to authorize a strike in the fall quarter if Chancellor
Young does not recognize our union. Because striking is such a
serious action that will effect much of the UCLA community, we
offer the following statement of reasons why voting to authorize a
strike is the most effective way to win the collective bargaining
rights we democratically demand.
Why is a recognized union and collective bargaining so important
to us? Collective bargaining is the right of all workers to sit
down at the bargaining table with their employers to negotiate the
terms of their jobs. At UCLA, nurses, janitors, professional and
technical employees, operating engineers, patient care technical
employees, librarians, clerical workers and lecturers have
collective bargaining rights. This right is a basic one shared by
workers throughout the world, but denied to teaching assistants,
research assistants, tutors and readers at UCLA.
Without collective bargaining, real wages for teaching
assistants at UCLA have declined 13.8 percent from January 1991
until fall 1995. In fall 1995, the University of California cut
real wages for academic student employees 1.5 percent and further
jeopardized our future cost of living adjustments by violating past
university practice of giving all academic employees the same cost
of living adjustments.
The University of California also imposed a pay cut of 8.95
percent in the guise of the Defined Contribution Plan for
non-registered employees or those working over 50 percent time, and
eroded our grievance rights and increased section sizes, with a
corresponding increase in workload.
Without recognition and a contract, there is no guarantee that
our union-won fee waiver will be preserved in the face of the
pending state budget shortfall. Without collective bargaining,
there is also no institutional mechanism for winning some of the
rights and benefits enjoyed by academic student employees at
unionized campuses throughout the nation: dental and optical
insurance; affordable health insurance for spouses, children and
domestic partners; and the right to bring grievances to binding
third-party arbitration.
Why are we discussing going on strike? We have tried several
other tactics, and none have won recognition. We’ve written letters
to and met with Chancellor Young and many other administrators.
We’ve demonstrated. We’ve held marches and informational "pickets."
We’ve written opinion pieces. We’ve satirized Chancellor Young’s
anti-union arguments in letters and on posters. We’ve taken part in
a legal hearing before the California Public Employment Relations
Board. We’ve held a convention where nationally prominent speakers
such as U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters admonished the
administration to recognize us. We’ve picketed peacefully outside
Chancellor Young’s exclusive gated community. We’ve even gone on a
limited two-day strike.
How likely are we to win recognition with this vote and strike?
In light of the fact that strikes, or threats of strikes, have won
recognition and other gains for many academic student employee
unions around the country, we feel the UC system-wide strategy
planned a year ago and affirmed at the academic student employee
convention is sound. Kicking off the system-wide campaign was UC
Berkeley membership’s overwhelmingly favorable vote last week
authorizing a strike in the fall.
The organized campuses make up the majority of campuses in the
University of California, employing over two-thirds of all academic
student employees in the system. Therefore, if we are forced to
strike by the university’s failure to recognize us, our strikes
cannot be ignored.
Why not let the issue of Student Association of Graduate
Employees (SAGE) recognition be "settled" in court? Instead of
recognizing SAGE’s verified majority (by the Public Employment
Relations Board  PERB) show of support (as is standard
practice in most employment contexts), the University of California
has spent over $1.5 million in legal costs over the last year alone
to stall recognizing academic student employee unions at UC San
Diego and UCLA.
The PERB hearings are not necessary for us to begin collective
bargaining with the university. We are only in the hearings because
UCLA refuses to recognize us. The legal case will only decide if
the UCLA administration is forced to do what PERB told them it
could do voluntarily two years ago.
UCLA administrators who urge us to be "reasonable" and let the
issue of recognition be settled in the courts mislead the union’s
supporters, the campus community and state taxpayers by encouraging
them to wait for a ruling in a very costly process the
administration did not have to enter and for which there may be no
end in sight. (A similar case at UC Berkeley lasted nine years and
cost millions of public dollars and didn’t settle anything as
evidenced by the fact that we’re still demanding recognition.)
Why is SAGE recognition good for undergraduate education? In the
face of increased section sizes and a corresponding increase in
workload, academic student employees continue to provide quality
individual service for all their students. The tension would be
significantly reduced, however, with a contractually defined
workload policy and effective grievance procedure to enforce this
policy.
However, without a union and collective bargaining, academic
student employees are left vulnerable to the "benevolence" (or lack
thereof) of their departments, since the administration does not
deem workload worthy of coverage under the grievance procedure.
Undergraduates themselves recognize our right to recognition and
the beneficial effect it will have on their education, as
demonstrated by resolutions from the last two undergraduate student
governments, which have passed resolutions urging Chancellor Young
to recognize SAGE in the interests of democracy and educational
quality.
We recognize that striking is a serious action with grave
consequences for all involved, but we are left with no alternative.
We have been demanding our collective bargaining rights for two
years at UCLA and 13 years in the UC system, and have met with only
intransigence, paternalism and millions of public dollars in legal
costs and administrators’ salaries squandered to stop our
union.
Clearly, the academic student employee union movement is here to
stay. The time has come to take serious direct action to build our
union and make the University of California come to the bargaining
table. Come tonight at six to Kinsey 51 to vote to win our
collective bargaining rights.
Ibarra is an Academic Advancement Program tutor and vice
president of the Student Association of Graduate Employees/United
Auto Workers.
Daily Bruin file photo
An authorization vote last year culminated in a strike in April
by the Student Association of Graduate Employees (above). This year
has seen numerous protests and walkouts, like the one in November
(below).